


Bait With Your Heart

by Magz (sparklepocalypse)



Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 15:38:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4527708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparklepocalypse/pseuds/Magz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Non-linear, second-person POV, and slightly AUish. "A boy from your class sits down next to you and lets you play with his red Power Ranger.  You give him part of your Fruit Roll-Up and he gives you some of his Goldfish, and when it's time for story hour, he scoots his mat close to yours."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bait With Your Heart

He's thirty-one when the bill is signed into law. You're thirty, and you're clutching his hand tight, so tight, and you're both smiling so widely that your faces hurt.

That night, you take a little black box out of its hiding place in your dresser and put on the ring he gave you -- he's been wearing the one you gave him the whole time. You fall asleep curled around each other like you have for three years.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

When you're fifteen, he begins a campaign apparently designed to destroy your clothes with sticky, sugary syrup and crushed ice. As slushie drips down your face and into your collar, you tell yourself that at least it's not a dumpster.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

You're thirty-three when his unit is deployed to the Middle East. The night before he ships out you wrap yourself around him and try to burn the feel of him in your arms into your memory.

When you tell him he'd better come back to you, he tells you he loves you.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

You fall on the playground and scrape your knees a week after your seventh birthday. It hurts, and you want your mommy but she's not coming back, and the recess monitors are busy breaking up a fight between two bigger boys so you sit on the ground, miserable and sniffling. Then a boy from your class sits down next to you and lets you play with his red Power Ranger.

You give him part of your Fruit Roll-Up and he gives you some of his Goldfish, and when it's time for story hour, he scoots his mat close to yours. When you get off the school bus that afternoon, you tell your daddy that you made a forever friend, and he looks really happy for the first time in a long time.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

You're seventeen and you find him bleeding in the boys' bathroom. You almost drop your iPhone three times before you call 911. And you hate him. You hate him _so much_ \-- you hate him more at that moment than you ever have before. And even though you hate him, and you try so hard to forget how white his face is when the paramedics wheel the gurney out into the hallway, you wake up in a cold sweat for weeks afterward.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

You're thirty-six. He's sitting on the bed in front of you, his shoulders hunched and his head down. He's holding deployment papers in his hand. You want to pull him close and never let go. He asks what you think he should do. You tell him to come back to you.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

When you're nine, you grow apart. He plays football and you don't. You take dance lessons and he doesn't. You stop going to the secret hiding place on the playground to share snacks, and so does he.

After awhile, you decide it's not so bad that you don't have your forever friend anymore. When you grow up, you'll have lots of them.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

You're four, and your mommy is your best friend. You like the way she smiles when your daddy does something nice for her.

You ask her when she knew she loved him. She hugs you tight and tells you that it was when she noticed he was a good man.

When you ask what she means, and wasn't daddy always a good man, she laughs -- it sounds like the bells on Sunday morning -- and says you'll understand someday.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

You meet his eyes across the crowded restaurant. It's your twenty-fourth birthday today, and you're back home celebrating with all your forever friends.

He looks away first.

The next morning, you run into him at Starbucks and he shifts back and forth uncomfortably for a moment before turning and leaving. When he leaves the coffee shop, you try not to wonder at how much it looks like he's running away.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

You're shouting at him in a locker room that smells like socks and sweat and body spray. You're sixteen and you've never been so terrified or so angry. But with every word, the terror gives way to a new swell of rage and you feel like you're screaming now, words meant to hurt like the slam of your body against a locker. And then --

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

He kisses you and tells you he'll be back in an hour. It's been nearly fifteen years since you let him into your life again. Somehow you can't believe he'll be forty next spring.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

You're eighteen, and you're packing the last of your things. College starts in two weeks, but you need to be prepared. You check and double-check your list before making one last run to Target. Your family keeps insisting that there are stores where you'll be attending school, but it never hurts to be prepared.

When your cart nearly collides with his at the checkout, you feel like something is missing. Later, as you're putting your bags in the car, you realize that it was intimidation.

Then you realize it's been missing for months now.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

Twelve, and you think you catch a glimpse of him at your dance recital. You wonder why he sat all the way in the back row.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

Nineteen, and you come home on break to find that his father's died. It makes you think of Fruit Roll-Ups and Goldfish. You wonder if there's a grown-up equivalent. Then you wonder why you care.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

Ten, and when a bigger kid trips you, a new girl comes to your aid. You know he's watching, but you decide you won't look back.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

When you're twenty-five you come home for good. It takes you three weeks to gather up the nerves to confront him, no matter what anyone says about courage.

Six months later you're heading off a confrontation of another sort, as your family demands to know if you're seeing the man who made your life a living hell in high school. You laugh it off... but inside, you can't help but think of something your mom told you when you were very little.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

You're thirty-eight. Two police officers are standing on your porch.

·   ·   ·   ·   ·

It's your first day of school. As careful as a five-year-old can be, you climb up the tall steps onto the school bus for the very first time, and a boy wearing a Spider-Man tee shirt pats the seat next to him and says you can share. He sticks his tongue through the hole where his left front tooth is supposed to be, and then he tells you his name is David and that he's six years old.

On the second day of school, David's not on the same bus as you, and you won't even remember him and his Spider-Man shirt a year later when he shares his Goldfish on the playground.

_~~end~~ beginning_


End file.
